Marketing Advantages
The marketing advantages that a virtual tour provide you are huge! A virtual tour is a cost effective way to market a property as apposed to traditional marketing methods such as buying ads in local newspapers which are costly and ineffective. The flat 2D photo is dying a slow painful death. If that’s all you’re using these days to attract potential buyers then you need to start thinking about using interactive media such as virtual tours and videos. With an online virtual tour you also get the benefit of marketing to a much larger and geographically dispersed clientele including Australia wide and internationally too. As we all know investors and buyers from China are snapping up Sydney and Melbourne real estate at a large rate. A virtual tour allows an overseas or interstate buyer to inspect a property without having to travel to see it. I’ve even heard of stories of overseas property investors making purchases of Australian property purely from just seeing a virtual tour and never actually ever stepping inside. How’s that for marketing reach!
Virtual tours also have been proven to drive more traffic to your listings and increase web site hit rate. Research has shown that property listings which feature a virtual tour are viewed up to ten times more than a listing with just static photos. Just imagine how many more potential buyers you could get for a property with up to ten times more buyers looking at the listing online.
Whilst virtual tour technology has been around since the early 2000’s it is about to explode in a big way. This is partly due to the development and advances in HMD’s (Head Mounted Displays). Companies such as Oculus which Facebook purchased for a cool $2 Billion last year, have pioneered the reintroduction of bringing virtual tours and virtual reality to the masses. The market is being flooded with HMD’s and big companies such as Google and Samsung who have worked with Oculus, have released their own products. All of them centre around using your smart phone as the viewing screen and by simply inserting your phone into the HMD, loading up a virtual tour with a custom app which displays the image in split screen (stereoscopic – a separate image for each eye), you’re virtually transported to another world. Google, in typical Google fashion, is trying to get this technology to the masses and has recently released version 2 of their Google Cardboard. Its effectively a HMD but its made from cardboard and can be branded with your company’s branding and logo. A user simply unfolds Cardboard (as it comes flat packed), insert your smartphone, and hold it up to your face to experience the virtual tour. It’s a very basic HMD but it works, and the potential to be distributed cheaply to reach the masses is huge.